WSG helps tourism sector pivot to digital marketing with career conversion programme

Workforce Singapore (WSG) will launch an enhanced career conversion programme (CCPs) for digital marketing tourism professionals in September this year. The programme will be enhanced with new digital sales modules such as optimising sales conversion techniques and maintaining after-sale customer relationships through digital channels. According to the 24th Jobs Situation Report by WSG and the Ministry of Manpower, the programme will help employees from the hotel and tourism sectors take on roles with better prospects such as digital sales and marketing executive, product specialist, and business development specialist in the next two years.

This comes after a demand sensing survey conducted by WSG, with close to 60 participating companies, which found that 23% were still conducting sales and marketing efforts mainly on traditional channels such as TV commercials and print advertisements. Also, 39% only started to conduct sales and marketing digitally in 2020 while 75% said that they would like to improve their digital sales and marketing skills. At the same time, 23% felt that they lacked workers with the right digital sales and marketing skills.

WSG’s regular industry engagements also revealed that smaller, independent hotels shared that they would like to improve on their digital sales and marketing skills, and would benefit from more support in this area.

According to the report by WSG, visitor arrivals fell by 85.7% in 2020 to reach 2.7 million visitors, while tourism receipts declined by 82.6% to SG$4.8 billion due to the pandemic. As the tourism and lifestyle services sector transformed, both new and existing workers needed to be equipped with digital skill sets such as eCommerce, data analytics and digital sales and marketing.

WSG had then launched 18 new CCPs in January 2020 to equip workers with skills to adopt new technology as well as digital and technical skills. From January 2020 to mid-August 2021, more than 3,100 workers from over 200 companies had enrolled in CCPs for the tourism and lifestyle services sector. The CCPs are expected to further benefit another 1,400 workers from now until December 2022.

While the tourism and lifestyle services sector had been badly hit by the pandemic, companies are still hiring for in-demand digital roles such as digital marketing executive and digital sales/eCommerce executive. At present, there are close to 100 vacancies for these roles on MyCareersFuture.

Separately, a report by online job site Indeed earlier this year revealed that marketing was found to be one of the worst performing sector when it came to job postings. Job postings for the marketing sector in 2020 suffered a 30.5% decline as compared to 2019. This was greater than the average national decline. In February this year alone, there was a 3% decrease in job postings for marketing roles, ranking it the fifth worst performing sector.

Photo courtesy: 123RF

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